21 September 2015 – All reading starts off sympathetic. If you’re reading what someone wrote, it’s because you want to understand what she or he means. You’re assuming that the writing is intelligible, that it has some value and that understanding how the world looks to someone else has some value. The root of the word “reading” goes back to “riddling” and applies to our trying to piece together the writer’s world from the words that she or he broke it into.
And that’s how I feel whenever I read something by Ralph Losey or Jason Baron: the writing is always intelligible, always has some value and they present their world in a cogent fashion.
Not that you will always be persuaded, but it will make you think. Thomas Kuhn … that mischievous bloke who gave us the phrase “paradigm shift” in his brilliant 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions … uses the example of how, when reading Aristotle in depth, he could not fathom how Aristotle could have been so wrong about motion. Aristotle was a great scientist, yet he insisted that rocks fall and flames rise because they’re trying to get to their proper places in the universe. Kuhn struggled with this for a long time until he realized that we as modern people assume motion is something that happens to a thing, while the Greeks thought that movement was a property of things, like its color or weight. It’s simply a property of things that they’ll try to get to their “proper” places. It made him think. He realized that great minds can actually foster (and illuminate) a deep think of differences of perception.
And that’s what Ralph and Jason do: force you into a deep think. I was doing that over the weekend as I was reading the September issue of KMworld which has “Information Governance” as its special supplement. Plus going through all of my “enterprise search” notes from DLD Tel Aviv which I recently attended.
Because in the e-discovery world Ralph Losey is the “King of Search” and Jason Baron is the “King of Information Governance”.
Data privacy and security breaches, e-discovery sanctions, recordkeeping compliance penalties. Talk to an information governance believer and they’ll tell you these are risks borne by organizations that fail to effectively control their information. Control your information, or your information controls you. And it will get worse. Information governance includes figuring out what kinds of machine learning techniques work well in a variety of settings where law, information management, and business intelligence intersect.
The “search is first” crowd says “No way”. They think the preoccupation with classification, retention, and destruction of data will soon stop being a viable, efficient activity. It cannot withstand the continuing exponential growth of data. Instead, they suggest we best focus on the googlesque approach: save everything and search instead of classify.
And so there is a divide. A search-versus-information governance issue. As Ralph Losey has put it “there is a micro-battle between information governance and search in the legal world that reflects a larger conflict in the greater information technology world”.
Pundits like Jim Shook and Bryant Bell of EMC have tried to put it all in perspective, writing about data lakes and information and storage and what technology is doing in the information governance/search divide. Dean Gonsowski of Recommind has blogged that the search folk fail to consider the security, privacy, and regulatory risks attendant with information, and the need for balance.
Well, kind of a divide. Ralph and Jason are good friends. And in many cases, they are not that far apart and often concede points to “the other side”. Ralph writes respectfully about information governance on his blog, and it’s important to remember that Jason helped launch TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) which is all about search.
And both come with the highest of “street creds”. Ralph is the National eDiscovery Counsel and a Shareholder of Jackson Lewis, a computer hacker (white hat only), author of e-DiscoveryTeam.com blog, a maven at software and the search and review of electronic evidence using artificial intelligence, etc., etc. For a nice bio click here.
And Jason? Well, Of Counsel in the Information Governance and eDiscovery Group of Drinker Biddle, Co-Chair of the Information Governance Initiative, first appointed Director of Litigation at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, etc., etc. For his bio click here.
During this past year’s LegalTech in New York we did a video interview and I asked them to put search/information governance in perspective. They did. We taped for 1 hour but herein a “snapshot” of the most relevant points:
From Legal Tech 2015
A chat with Ralph Losey and Jason R Baron
Search-versus-information governance
